Thursday, January 29, 2004

New tacticsHere’s a silly new creationist tactic. If they can’t drive the concept of evolution out the schools, they’ll try to drive the word “evolution” out. The new guidelines for middle and high school science classes in Georgia do just that.

Much of the state's 800-page curriculum was adopted verbatim from the "Standards for Excellence in Education," an academic framework produced by the Council for Basic Education, a nonprofit group. But when it came to science, the Georgia Education Department omitted large chunks of material, including references to Earth's age and the concept that all organisms on Earth are related through common ancestry. "Evolution" was replaced with "changes over time," and in another phrase that referred to the "long history of the Earth," the authors removed the word "long."

The result of such curricula in other states is that it does not necessarily win kids over to fundamentalist view point as it’s sponsors hope; it just assure that they are confused about what science is, how it works, and what the leading theories are. When they get to college, the students are incompetent in geology, astronomy, some physics, and, of course, biology.